Robert Halfon, chair of the Education Select Committee, has questioned whether the new strain of Covid-19 has as much of an impact as has been reported.
Speaking to Good Morning Britain, the Tory MP said: “We haven’t had the advice from the chief medical officer and the chief science officer, previously they were saying time and time again that the risks to Covid for children were low and that there were marginal transmission rates.”
He added: “I asked a very senior public health England official only just before Christmas whether or not this new variant made a difference and he said there was no evidence for that.
“So what we need to do is hear from the chief medical officer and chief science officer what exactly is the scientific evidence, because at the moment we’ve had a few media reports, but we don’t know for sure.”
Mr Halfon also called for the Government to “weigh up” the risks of Covid-19 to children, compared to the risk closing schools poses to their wellbeing.
He said: “We also have to weigh up the risks to children’s academic attainment, their wellbeing, their mental health and I wouldn’t just dismiss that.
“We’ve seen today that eating disorders amongst young people has gone up significantly because of many not being in schools, some of them being in isolation, some of them being exposed to online harm; so we need to weigh up all these things.”
He added: “Already pupils in some years are something like 15 to 22-months behind than they should be, and whilst we have a vaccine for the coronavirus we don’t have a vaccination if we destroy people’s life chances.”
“We need a route map out of this. We can’t have schools as a revolving door that are open, shut, open, shut with parents and the teaching staff not knowing from one day to the next what’s going to happen,” he said.
“I don’t want to have an epidemic of educational poverty endemic in our country.”
